GPS for Life

For Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2016 Presidential candidate, 2009 was a very tough year. Her 35-year-old daughter was found dead, and Fiorina herself underwent extensive and difficult treatment for breast cancer. But it was a good year as well, because 2009 was the year that Carly Fiorina really reconnected with her faith.

Here is how Carly Fiorina describes her faith for much of her life: “I grew up a faithful person. I never lost faith. I prayed every day all throughout my life. But at some point in life, my faith became fairly abstract.” She said began to view God “as something of a super CEO of a massive enterprise” who “didn’t attend to every detail.”

But fortunately, over the course of several years just prior to 2009, Carly re-found her personal relationship with God, which she says was incredibly helpful to her, her husband and her family when the challenges of 2009 where upon them. What role did her faith play? Here is how she describes it: “When my mother died a decade earlier, I didn’t have this personal connection with God, and her death shattered me. When Lori (her daughter) died, my personal relationship with Jesus Christ saved me.”

In describing her transformation to a more meaningful and relevant faith, Carly provides a great “visual” that I think we all can draw on when we start to doubt God’s interest in the details of our lives:

“One of the reasons I re-found that personal connection (with God) is through thinking about science. Human beings have created a GPS system that can keep track of billions of moving objects and provide very precise instructions to all of them. And so it occurred to me that if human beings can do that, certainly God understands what's going on in each of our lives and He answers those prayers that He should.”

So when you feel sheepish, or selfish, or question the appropriateness of asking God for help in the relatively tiny details of your life, think of that GPS system on your phone or in your vehicle. Know that God can help with any and every detail of your life – provided that you ask Him to. Remember, your GPS system is useless if you don’t turn it on. Likewise, if you don’t open the lines of communication with God, He may be trying to help, but sadly, you are not going to hear Him.